Aeon Flux

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With some fascination, I've been making my way through the original Aeon Flux animated series.

It is pretty much what most online reviewers say it is. Totally befuddling storytelling, but pretty compelling if you just let yourself go with it.

I've heard that Aeon Flux was "like" anime, but to me it looks more like those comics you find in Heavy Metal. I see a lot more Moebius in it than any anime I can recall. Although the visual style is kind of a mixture of the grotesque and fetishistic. I don't know if I would call it sexy. It's almost sexy, but perhaps ultimately too grotesque. It's interesting, to say the least.

It does feel like a more "experimental" type of cartoon than an actual, fully formed show. But I quite enjoy it, especially 20-40 minutes before sleeping.

I'm also quite convinced that Aeon Flux is ultimately about sex fetishes--particularly of the S&M variety--and I have no problem with that. If anything, I kind of wished they allowed actual nudity in it. To be a show about sex and not have actual nudity seems a bit lame to me, but I guess even MTV were drawing the line there. Which is odd, since I'm sure they've run anime films with nudity in it at around the same time Aeon Flux was airing. Whatever.

Overall, I do wish we saw more animated TV series TODAY that kind of push the envelope a little visually and thematically. Well, I guess we do, it's just that people aren't interested.

What do you guys think of the show?
 
I think the lack of nudity was great. It made the artists get creative with how much they could get away with. The series started off as as a series of shorts on MTV's Liquid Television and was later expanded into a series. The entire concept was avant-garde, since almost all the shorts ended up with Aeon dying (long before Kenny kicked the bucket weekly on South Park).

Although it wasn't mentioned in the series, I always imagined each episode as an alternative time line from the same world. The series was made in 1991 and I think there was some influence from the Berlin wall's collapse from 1989 still present in the mind of Peter Chung, the creator. The two countries in Aeon Flux, Monica and Bregna, as well as Aeon and Trevor are caricatures for differing political agendas. I think the S&M sprinkled into wardrobe and wordplay was symbolic for dominant and submissive nature of the political struggle throughout the series. The series treated sex and politics as tools to control pawns in order to get/maintain power.
 
Conversely, you could also argue that the "real" political struggle was symbolic for the "sexual" politics between the characters ;). Despite the surprisingly well developed world building, it always does feel a bit more "intimate" than the geopolitics the show might have you believe. I really like that.

My problem with the lack of nudity is more along the lines of well, MTV allows these characters to pleasure themselves through S&M and the characters are shown to sleep with other people quite liberally, and they're even allowed to "climax" onscreen, so why can't they get away with nudity as well? Very strange television standards at work here. There's nothing stranger than to see these characters after a very obvious sex session walk around with the camera strategically placed away from the "naughty bits".

At the same time, I'm impressed MTV even gave the OK to this series. I don't see any network today with the "cojones" to run something as idiosyncratic as this. Spike TV? CN Adult Swim? But they'd definitely never help produce something like this if someone went up to them and pitched them this idea from scratch.

I've mentioned before that I've always liked the idea of "wordless" action cartoons. While the shorts you mentioned were wordless, I really like that the dialogue in the half-hour series was pared down as well. One could even argue that even in the half hour show it's not necessary to follow the episode. Historically, we've always seen humour cartoons in wordless form, but we almost never see "wordless" action cartoons. Which is one of the main reasons this series is attractive to me.

I agree that Aeon Flux should be considered "avant garde" in the most defined sense of the word. It really wasn't like anime, and it wasn't really like most of the animation that runs on TV these days, cable or otherwise. It's actually more like those cartoon shorts you might run into in some arthouse theatres, and those things almost NEVER see the light of day again outside those limited theatrical runs.
 
MTV was pretty avant garde when it came to stuff on Liquid Television. It was Adults Swim well before there was Adult Swim. I recall that Bill Plympton got a few shorts on the air through Liquid TV, and some of the other stuff they did on that show was just plain weird. Aeon Flux was always one of the ones that really made an impression, though, so I don't think it's surprising at all that they OK'ed a series. MTV was a very different network than the one it is today.

I do think that Adult Swim is the only entity today that would help produce something like Aeon Flux if it were proposed today, but I agree with you in doubting that they actually would. After reading Speedy's review of Superjail, it sounds like it's roughly equivalent by being extremely idiosyncratic and highly transgressive, although it's played more for laughs. HBO might do something like that, too.
 
Aeon Flux was great, as was Beavis & Butthead and The Maxx, too bad MTV does not really care about animation anymore, or music video's for that matter (Which was their main thing). MTV ysed to be a great network in the late 80's and early 90's, I will always remember when they got serious about producing some animated projects in the mid 90's, those where good days. It's funny how someone made a movie on Aeon Flux when it seemed like the animated series was not too popular, both were good though.
 
This show always seemed too over the top with the fetish stuff when I first watched it. It always turned me off a bit. I might be able to appreciate it more after so much time has passed, though, this thread does make it seem interesting with the idea that the international power struggles are just a metaphor for sexual power dynamics.

I watched Liquid Television just about every time it aired. The thing about it was that it was rather hit or miss. Sure, there was some mind-blowing stuff shown, but there were also segments I began to dread after a while, like the one with the puppet biker chick Winter Steele and the Dog Boy segments.
 
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